Putting a Genus Fader ND on a Tokina 11-16mm lens

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draven4

Well-known member
I've always heard not to do it because it will vignette. Well it turns out it does worse things than that.

This is what happens. It's interesting and weird to see the pattern created when you adjust the fader ND. Does this mean it is just darkening areas of the lens? I have other video and pics and they came out with blotchy patches of dark uneven blobs. Also notice the color shifts withing the edges of the blobs.

I was just doing this for the sake of experimenting.

 
All faders do that, LCW, Singh Ray, Genus. If you're shooting with a wide angle you just can't darken it too much or else you will get the cross. The manufactures all make this pretty clear, so it's not much of a surprise.

If you have setup time, probably use NDs as they are better. But if you need to work quick, Faders are nice but have limitations.
 
Yeah I know they make it clear. I was just showing as I stated. I just thought it was interesting to see how it works and thought a few other might too.
 
Actually I had it zoomed in all the way to 16mm, so yes. If I didn't zoom then it will show very bad vignetting in addition to the pattern. This video only shows it as 16mm.
 
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one more reason to avoid the faders; happy I sold mine

but to be fair it's not such big a deal if this doesn't work on wide lenses, as in that case usually you can close your aperture all you want; my current filter system (cokin) wouldn't even work with such a wide lens, and my planned-for-the-future wide lens (tokina 16-28 on -also planned- full-frame body) doesn't even accept filters
 
On my recent London timelapse (http://www.vimeo.com/20438354), most of the shots were taken with the Canon EF-S 15-85mm lens at the wider setting (15mm). I had to use an ND8 to allow for longer shutter speeds, and thankfully my cheap ND8 doesn't exhibit this kind of cross (that is due to the coupling of the two polarizers I guess). Therefore, I think the solution would be to use fixed NDs and preferably thin ones to avoid vignetting.
 
Faders are great though for shooting anything quick. For any type of rapid documentary B-roll stuff, you really need a fader, because in the 5 minutes that it takes you to switch out the ND and figure out the lighting situation, the shot will probably be gone.

Work fast = Fader, when you have time to set up the shot = regular ND.
 
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